And so they were married.
Various people have various ideas about marriage,—ideas which sometimes do and sometimes do not coincide with facts. Love is as old as humanity. Marriage is an institution. Were this simply a mendacious tale of romantic youth, one might close it here with a sigh and the simple statement that they lived happily ever after. One could leave the rest to imagination.
And so they were married—married!
Well, what of it? People do not cease to live after marriage. To most it is only the beginning of their real being. So, one would say, it should have been for Rod Norquay and Mary Thorn. One would be right. They were possibly more fortunate than most. Home, friends, the invisible aura of wealth, established position, lay to their hand. They had nothing to face beyond the inevitable process of adaptation to the intimacies of matrimony, to each other's individual moods and tenses. This seemed no problem, since neither they nor any other young man or woman passionately in love ever recognized such a problem. Instinct triumphs; mutual taste smooths the way for compromises in the clash of their separate personalities.
Poverty, unremitting struggle for an economic foothold, unwelcome babies and frowsy domesticity withers many a fine flower of romantic passion when it should still be brightly blooming. Rod and Mary had before them no toilsome effort to keep the wolf from the door. Their place in the sun was made and provided. They had but to eat, drink, and be merry. Where could lie in wait for them the elements of clash and struggle, of fear and hope, of stifled griefs and aching disappointments,—all the sad travail and hard-won victories bestowed upon men and women through the long procession of the years?
Go to, you say. Considering the circumstances they marry and live happy ever after. That is the accepted formula.
Quite simple. But life is not an affair of formula. The simple tends to become the complex. So the findings of science indicate. So from time to time philosophers inform us. We don't pay much attention, by and large, to either scientific or philosophic fulminations. But occasionally one or the other, or both, utters a workable truth. The dictum that even the simplest thing contains within itself all the elements of the profoundly complex is one of these basic truths.
Fate, Destiny, God, Chance, whoever or whatever rolls the dice of events did not decree that Rod and his wife should come to their full estate by way of teas and tennis, the secure comfort of Hawk's Nest and the full social life open to the Norquays in town when they chose to avail themselves of town. It didn't elect for Mary an absorption into the younger matrons' set, immediate luxury and alternate boredom and excitement. Nor for Rod a mixture of gentlemanly leisure, casual attention to estate affairs and dillettante efforts at writing a prose epic of pioneering times. No. Before they were born, forces were shaping to jostle them out of this pleasant groove. Or was it merely a careless roll of the dice? Who can say?
They returned from a brief honeymoon quite frankly absorbed in each other, in the confirmation of the dreams and glamor of love, exultingly triumphant in having achieved a perfect union of the spirit as well as the flesh. They were welcomed to Hawk's Nest by a hand-picked group of the family and intimates. Laska, Phil, their father, their sister Dorothy from Victoria with two chubby sons, two cousins from Montreal, an old school chum of Phil's with his wife.
For the time it seemed to Rod that his childish impression of family solidarity, of complete and intimate understanding and support, which had made so fine an atmosphere of home about the place, had been restored in full force. As if the Norquay Trust Company and Grove's hectic yachting parties, jazz and restlessness, the slow disintegration of their unity had vanished into some place remote.